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Short answer: Rockstar pays $10,000 to modder who fixed GTA Online loading times Developer working on official patch following user’s work on cutting down load times by 70%

Details:

Rockstar Games has paid a modder $10,000 for identifying a way to make Grand Theft Auto Online load significantly faster.

The modder, who goes by the handle ‘t0st,’ recently posted their discovery of a single-thread CPU bottleneck that occurs in the PC version of the hit multiplayer mode.

They created a fix they claim enables the game to load 70% faster, and included a message for Rockstar, advising that the issue “shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve.”

As word of t0st’s discovery spread, Rockstar verified that not only does it function, but that an official fix will be released in a future game update.

In a statement to PC Gamer, the company said: “After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved.

“As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”

According to an update to t0st’s original post, Rockstar awarded him $10,000 as part of its Bug Bounty program, despite the fact that the program is normally focused on security vulnerabilities.

Grand Theft Auto Online brings in a lot of money for Rockstar parent Take-Two, thanks to in-game purchases and its role in helping GTA V sell over 140 million copies since its release.

GTA Online had more players in every month of 2020 than in any other year, according to Take-most Two’s current financials. The year 2020 saw the second-highest number of GTA V copies sold, after only the year it was released in 2013.

GTA Online, like its sibling game Red Dead Redemption Online, is set to launch as a standalone release later this year.

Related Questions

Will Rockstar pay out to the modder who fixed GTA 5’s Crashing problem?

Turns out that they were right – or, at least partly – as Rockstar confirmed this fix worked, although it didn’t specify if the 70% number was accurate. The developer is now set to launch this fix in an official capacity in a future update, hence the pay-out to the modder who discovered the solution six years after GTA5’s launch.

Why does GTA 5 multiplayer take so long to load?

Soon, that’ll be fixed. Grand Theft Auto 5 modder t0st managed to discover a CPU bottleneck in the PC version of the game’s multiplayer mode which slows down loading screens to such an extent that it became a running joke in the community. Their fix got them a $10,000 reward from Rockstar Games itself.

Can t0st solve Rockstar’s loading time problem?

But the story has taken a fascinating turn with the work of a modder, t0st, who set to work trying to solve a problem that Rockstar seemingly couldn’t. And he…did. In a lengthy post that went viral late last month, t0st lays out the loading time problem and the solution he came up with.

How long does it take to load into GTA Online?

For some reason, load times for GTA Online have been horrendous pretty much since the inception of the mode, with players having to wait not just a few minutes to get in, but often anywhere from 3-15 minutes. Bizarre, given the high profile of the game.